What will it take to make the Splinter Cell movie succeed?

Producer Basil Iwanyk on the challenges of adapting the video game to the big screen.

By
Avinash Bali

While we know that Ubisoft's Splinter Cell is getting a movie with Tom Hardy starring as special-ops agent Sam Fisher, we haven’t heard many details about the project itself. But while visiting the set of the Keanu Reeves revenge action thriller John Wick this week (more on that soon), I caught up with Basil Iwanyk, who is also producing Splinter Cell through his Thunder Road Pictures. The film is still in the planning stages, but Iwanyk (who has also produced Clash of the Titans, The Town, and many other films) was able to discuss the challenges of adapting a video game to movie form. Read on for what he had to say...

IGN: Video game movies don't have the best track record, so how do you avoid the pitfalls of previous game adaptations?

Basil Iwanyk: Well, we haven't made the movie, obviously, but I've read the script. When people read the script -- it's written by Eric Singer, who just wrote American Hustle -- all of their trepidations will fall away. It's a great script. To me, it's a perfect marriage of honoring what made the game great with a standalone movie. I don't know why other video game movies haven't worked. I think about Splinter Cell, the game itself, and the story is always grounded in reality. It was slightly pushed with some of the more technological stuff, but frankly I think that in our own fantasy we assume that the government already has the technology and they're not telling us -- or they're about to tell us! [laughs]

In terms of avoiding [the pitfalls of previous films], none of us have looked back and gone, "Okay, what did these other movies do wrong that we have to avoid?" I think each one was a very specific case. Although in general I think that the challenge of movies like [Thunder Road’s] Gods of Egypt, Clash of the Titans, Splinter Cell, and even something like Godzilla -- which I have nothing to do with -- is that you've gotta make sure that you just don't appeal to either A) the people who play the video games, or B) just dudes. You look at a movie like Skyfall -- it made a billion dollars. Women loved it as much as men. What did they do that made that movie what it was? You know, the Bourne movies. Why were those movies so successful? I think you look at the movies that have worked, that have transcended, in this case, the core male audience, and look at what they did that was able to transcend that and appeal to people that would maybe not see those kinds of movies?

So we're not really looking at what was done in the past in terms of video game movies. It's more of, how do we take the lessons and successes of other movies and apply them to ours? Video games are just another piece of great IP. If you look at a book or a remake, it's a world that you can mine. Just like in most adaptations -- maybe exempting the Harry Potters and the Lord of the Rings -- you take what is great about it and you somehow metastasize it into the film language. That's what we're trying to do.

IGN: What is great about it, do you think?

BI: Well, the character is great. I am the target audience. For me, what's great is the trade craft, the spy craft, the world that people don't know exists, the incredible locations, the exotic bad guys. But what Eric brought to the script in conjunction with his conversation with Tom is just a really cool character, a character that we have never seen in this kind of movie. You've got a guy like Tom Hardy, you've gotta go for it! You have to make it cool, and it's cool. It's really cool.

IGN: Obviously this is putting the cart before the horse, but is it a franchise?

BI: I think you go into every movie with the hope of a franchise. [laughs]

IGN: Well, you're a producer! Is there a bigger story already conceived?